his bit about The Tingler touches me right in the heart because it’s one of my favorite William Castle schlock fests & it’s a lil beautiful love note to Vincent Price’s craft.
QFT. I love his rejection of the "campy" designation, too. However, while I can forgive Waters for not mentioning and TCM for not editing in clips of his hilariously awesome animated work as Vincent Van Ghoul in
The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, which served as
my personal introduction to Vincent Price, I can't forgive no mention/clips of him as Egghead in
Batman.
Kinski’s memoir All I Need I Love is one of the most outrageous things I’ve ever read, a lifelong manic ego trip. He was kind of opposite to the three directors mentioned before, because he could not care less of the movies he was appearing in most of the time and his journey was all about him rampaging through life. Movies were often kind of annoying sidenote for him, but while watching some of his b-movies one can always imagine, that after any given scene Kinski was probably off from the set as fast as he can to bang a gargantuan Mongolian hooker or on some other fucked up adventure.
I'm not a Kinski fanboy or anything, but I recently watched
Crawlspace for the first time - which is the film that inspired the film-about-the-film
Please Kill Mr. Kinski - and thought that I should recommend it to you guys in case you haven't seen it. Not a very good movie (not even by '80s B-slasher movie standards), but man does it
look good. Fantastic production design and cinematography that made it seem like a minor
Suspiria (the mention of which is, I'm sure, like a dog whistle for
@europe1, so I'll also recommend it to you, too, if you haven't already seen it
).
That is a ridiculously awesome speech that I've never seen before. He gave that completely stone faced, dead-pan all the way through.
It's too bad he didn't live longer. It would've been so amazing if he'd had his own version of Hepburn's Dick Cavett appearance, some switch flipping inside his head that made him want to finally come out of his reclusive shell and just start shooting the shit and telling stories. Early in his career, he gave interviews comparatively freely, from long recorded audio interviews to pretty elaborate print interviews. As time went on, though, and as TV became really big, he just withdrew altogether. But he's such a fascinating guy with the most unique takes on things. That Icarus bit from that speech is just one example. Another is his famous comment to Stephen King about
The Shining, that, even though it's a horror story, at its core it's really an optimistic story since it's about ghosts, which implies a form of existence after death, and implying that there's
anything after death is optimistic
I liked that idea, that the hardest part of his day is getting out of the car in the morning. Kubrick is from the opposite end of the spectrum of awesome movie directors than Herzog and Stanley. This man mostly sat in his mansion buried in research and after ten years of planning came out like some legendary beast. Then for a year or so he daily abandoned his controlled comfort zone and threw himself at some overwhelming movie project.
I could've done a top five - or a top 10, or a top 50, or a top 300 - of all Kubrick stories/quotes. Like I said above, he was just such a fascinating guy. Here's a quick Kubrick top five excluding the shit I've already mentioned:
1)
His conflict with Lucien Ballard while filming
The Killing.
2) The thought of him and Malcolm McDowell taking breaks from McDowell's voice-over recordings for
A Clockwork Orange and playing ping pong.
3) His response to chatter on the set of
Spartacus about how he wore the same clothes every day. When he learned that people were commenting on the fact that he wore the same thing every day, he wore something different...and then only wore
that for the rest of the shoot.
4)
His Cagney comparison as a way of explaining to Spielberg why Jack Nicholson was awesome in
The Shining.
5)
His calm, straightforward question to the increasingly-losing-his-mind Sydney Pollack in regards to the number of takes while shooting the pool room scene in
Eyes Wide Shut.
